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Hi, I’m Bill!

he/him • 💻 GitHub/vegetabill • 📚 Goodreads

Me in a Nutshell

I’m a people-first engineer with a decade-long track record of delivering consumer-grade SaaS products. I prefer to be more stubborn on technical vision while staying flexible on implementation choices. Even more than shipping user delight, the most rewarding part of my role is often coaching others and seeing them produce amazing work.

Recent Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Lattice

2021, October – 2023, January (San Francisco)

💾 Tech stacks: GraphQL, Postgres, TS, React w/Relay, SQS Events

Most Recent Role

Senior engineer in Lattice’s performance reviews product domain, owned by 18 engineers across 4 teams.

Reviews was the business-critical product for Lattice, empowering enterprise customers to run review cycles with thousands of employees. Made up the vast majority of the company’s monolithic codebase and DB rows.

Delivery & Leadership

  • Project lead and anchor engineer on 3 dev-year initative to redesign analytics backend from the ground up using async events
  • Key contributor migrating monolith code to use new microservices
  • Top contributor to documentation, runbooks, and DataDog custom dashboards
  • Project lead for CSV import/export, 1 of the 3 critical-path projects adding employee rating calibration feature across scary legacy codebase (~2 dev-year portion)
  • Integrated Google Cloud API for text sentiment analysis including handling provider rate limiting

Org Impact

  • Created new interview question from scratch with accompanying training materials
    • question consistently praised by interviewers as effective and interviewees as fair/realistic
  • Ceaselessly improving all aspects of the technical interview process
    • evolving our intern/L1 process to fairly evaluate bootcamp grads
    • go-to person for technical recruiters for everything from last-minute fill-ins to understanding our hiring philosophy
  • Officially mentored multiple peers, including coaching a junior L1 through rapid promotion to L2
  • Facilitated an engineer book club on functional domain modeling resulting in cross-pollination of ideas across teams

Software Engineering Apprenticeship Manager, Techtonica

2020, January - July (San Francisco)

💾 Express, JS, Postgres, React

  • Managed fourth cohort of non-profit bootcamp that provides free training with stipend for low-income women and non-binary residents of the Bay Area
  • Directly managed 13 apprentice engineers learning full-stack web development using JavaScript
  • Navigated program through unplanned COVID transition from co-located in SF to fully remote
  • Created role documentation, backlog, and vision to ensure continuity
  • Advised board on program technical vision

Lead Developer (SDE3/L6), Goodreads (Amazon)

2014-2019 (San Francisco)

💾 Tech stacks: Rails, Python, Apache Spark, React, Java, MySQL

Revenue Engineering Team (2017-2019)

  • Led team of 7 other engineers to deliver ad products and author promo features for largest business unit in the org, collecting $2MM monthly revenue
  • Partnered with Kindle engineering teams to share ebook deal data via internal schema-based publishing platform
  • Resolved on-call tickets for Kindle-facing services, overnight email pipeline, and public website both as SME and coordinating with other ops and engineering teams inside and outside Goodreads
  • Coached engineers on the team via regular 1:1’s as well as advising product managers and other senior technical leaders
  • Analyzed and estimated multiple projects for business and technical stakeholders ranging in size up to 24 dev-months
  • Coached first-time Tech Lead to build confidence and empower team

Cross-Team/Cross-Project Contributions

  • Co-founder of Lightning Talk series for engineering and product/design to share their stories
  • Formally mentored several junior engineers within Goodreads, AWS, and Amazon Music
  • Evangelized React Native and GraphQL through talks and multiple hackathon projects, resulting in adoption for production features
  • Ceaseless kaizen cheerleading led to two peer teams adopting a custom lean process with improved productivity and satisfaction

Homepage Rebuild (2016)

  • Rebuilt the complete web homepage using React inside existing large Rails app
    • Before vs After (As of 2018, daily traffic of 2MM sessions)
  • Largest influencer for all technical decisions: React over Angular, immutable data structures, testing framework, architectural standards, ES2015
  • Implementer of integration infrastructure to bridge new React with existing Rails
  • Established official standards for view code on web using a living style guide, example code, and docs. Spread these new ideas across ~50 engineers at 2 office locations via instructor-led training and self-serve tutorials

Lead Developer, ThoughtWorks Products

2010-2014 (San Francisco)

Tech Lead - Mingle (Agile Software Project Management Tool, discontinued)

  • Evolved an on-premise Java/JRuby app to a multi-tenant SaaS system supporting 40K users
  • Extracted separate service to handle user license data
  • Promoted the product with salespeople at several conferences
  • Provided L3 production support for global customers, including site visits

Selected Writing

Extracurriculars

  • Techtonica - Volunteer mentor. Non-profit software boot camp offered tuition-free with stipend to Bay Area women/non-binary low-income residents.

Formal Education

  • MS, Information Science. University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • BA, English. University of Mary Washington. Fredericksburg, VA, USA